Photographs Photography 1990 2016

PHOTOGRAPHS, PHOTOGRAPHY

Photography was, for a very long time, almost within reach and just beyond anyone’s grasp.  Tantalizing, evanescent scenes glimmered in cameras long before they could be caught and held as pictures.  Draftsmen used a box fitted with a lens to get perspective in their drawings right.  The image they saw in that device was luminous and infinitely detailed, the most perfect painting reduced to miniature, but it remained as elusive as a mirage.  Photography was finally figured out, almost simultaneously, by several squabbling inventors, including an English gentleman scholar and a French theatrical entrepreneur.  Its arrival was met with astonishment and lawsuits, dire predictions and splendid expectations.

The only definition of photography that is both accurate and universal tells us nothing about the phenomenon of photographs.  “Photography is a process in which radiant energy acts upon a material that is sensitive to and that changes in response to that energy.”  This could just as well describe frying eggs or sunburn.

Photographs are condensations of time and space, appearances distilled.  They result from perfectly explicable events of physics and chemistry, yet they retain the appearance of magic.  Light and silver or silicon meet, elemental changes take place out of sight, and pictures appear.  The mystery of transformation, from light into image, occurs in utter darkness.

Both words and photographs are simplified and abstract forms of representation.  But a word represents the idea of a thing, whereas a photograph borrows its form and its identity from the thing itself.

William Carlos Williams wrote: “No ideas but in things.”

Wallace Stevens wrote a poem entitled:  “Not Ideas About the Thing, but the Thing Itself.”

Edward Weston wrote in his Daybooks: “. . . the camera should be used . . . for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself . . .”

Art and science are deeply involved with physical things, with the experience of the world as it is perceived through the senses.

In “Jerusalem,” William Blake wrote: “. . . art and science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars.”

Blake condenses in this phrase a belief that was given substance and shape in the Renaissance, a belief that art and science alike are built from careful, cumulative, comparative observations.

Photographs are formed directly and intrinsically from the minute particulars of appearances.  Photographs seem to witness and preserve reality, to confirm the belief that the greatest possible clarity of description leads directly to truth itself.  If we believe that facts and details form the foundations of knowledge and veracity, we are likely to believe in a direct correlation between photographs and truthfulness.

A traditional philosophical view holds that Appearances are merely the imperfect manifestations of Being.  Being is considered to be a higher order, the ultimate cause behind Appearance.  Immanuel Kant believed that nothing could appear unless something behind it caused it to appear, something which itself could not appear.  He said that appearance “demonstrates the existence of something that is not appearance.”

Hannah Arendt refuted the traditional distinction between Being and Appearing, claiming that they coincide, and that “Appearance is a primary condition, not a secondary one.”  She went on to ask: “Since we live in an appearing world, is it not much more plausible that the relevant and the meaningful in this world of ours should be located precisely on the surface?”

Richard Avedon seemed to give an affirmative answer: “My photographs don’t go below the surface.  They don’t go below anything. They’re readings of what’s on the surface. I have great faith in surfaces.  A good one is full of clues.”

1. H. Auden also offered a thought on this idea: “Does God judge us by appearances?  /  Sometimes I think He does.”

Arendt added a vital corollary to her argument concerning the importance of appearances.  She observed that appearances “. . . never just reveal; they also conceal.”

Decisions concerning what and when to photograph are the obverse of more frequent and no less important decisions of what and when not to photograph.

To say that one particular aspect and moment is more truthful than others is to imply that we are familiar with those that were not selected.  When we ascribe truthfulness to a photograph, we imply that the selections displayed in the picture correspond with our expectations.

Only statements can be true or false, and pictures, by themselves, are not statements.  A statement made about a picture may be true or false, but the picture to which it refers does not acquire or lose veracity as a result of the statement.

Our understanding of pictures is often modified by statements made about them.  If we are told that the house in a picture is the birthplace of a saint, the hideout of a murderer, or the home of Mr. and Mrs. Jones, we may be able to determine which statement, if any, is true, but the picture alone will not tell us.

If a house in a picture appears to be large but, when we visit it, we find it is small, we cannot say that the picture lied to us. We can say only that we inferred something from the picture that does not correspond with our direct experience of the house.

Explicitly and by inference, though most often unconsciously, we make statements about pictures.  We believe that pictures are truthful when they seem to confirm the statements we make about them.

 

We are passionately fond of facts.  “The fact,” wrote Robert Frost, “is the sweetest dream that labor knows.”  We believe that through photographs we can see things for ourselves, for themselves, that we can get the facts straight, without, we like to believe, anything between us and them.

Just as pictures are neither true nor false, facts are neither interesting nor uninteresting.  Only what we make of facts interests or fails to interest us.  In his introduction to The Travels of Marco Polo, John Masefield wrote: ” The acquisition of knowledge, the accumulation of fact, is noble only in those few who have the alchemy which transmutes such clay to heavenly eternal gold. . .  It is only the wonderful traveler who sees a wonder . . .”

No fact exists by itself.  A fact cannot be comprehended, let alone become useful, until it is recognized as part of a larger whole, until it is provided with context.  The characteristic quality of context is a sense of order.

Order is a product of perception, not an a priori condition. Jacob Bronowski explains: “Order does not display itself; if it can be said to be there at all, it is not there for the mere looking. There is no way of pointing a finger or a camera at it; order must be discovered and, in a deep sense, created.”

The question we must ask of photographs is not whether they are truthful but whether they provide access to significant meaning.  Such access can be provided only through that sense of order we call context.

Neither order nor truthfulness should be confused with accuracy.  In photographs, accuracy is unavoidable and truthfulness is no more than a fantasy.

Samuel Butler wrote: “I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.”

More recently, Richard Avedon commented: “There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph.  All photographs are accurate.  None of them is the truth.”

Description cannot be divorced from interpretation, and interpretation is never free from bias and selection. Identification itself is an act of interpretation.  We are deceived when we suppose that the intrinsic accuracy of the photograph relieves either the photographer or the viewer from the necessity of making interpretive choices.

Nothing is easier for photography than to represent a fact. But significance does not reside in facts.  The perception of significance depends upon an awareness of context.

 

John Berger asserts that photographs “quote from appearances,” a new turn of phrase for a figure of speech once used to describe the daguerreotype: “mirror with a memory.” But differences between quotations and photographs run deep, undermining the seductive simplicity of the comparison. Berger’s analogy is founded upon an invalid assumption; he tacitly accepts the conventional view that appearances are singular, fixed, and objective when, in fact, they have none of those qualities.

When a statement is accurately quoted, the original and the quotation are identical; there is only one way to get a quotation right.  Appearances are far more elusive than statements; they have no fixed, original form as Berger’s argument supposes.  Appearances are altered with every change of light and shift of position.  More importantly, appearances are inseparable from perception, a process that is infinitely variable and highly subjective.

Berger, Arnheim, Barthes, Sontag and others who have analyzed photography with considerable intelligence, persist in making the same fundamental error.  They entirely accept the idea that photographs are equivalents of subject matter. In doing so, they fail to understand the process of translation that is central to the medium.  Their contributions to critical thinking about photography have been valuable, but they are as important for what they reveal about the deficiencies of conventional wisdom as they are for the insights they were intended to convey.

To move from one medium to another is to translate. Translation is a parallel relationship in which one form may approach, but does not achieve, perfect congruence with another.  Translations are made not only from one language to another, but also from perceptions into imagery.

Translation requires choice.  The components, structures, meanings, and implications of one language are never exactly equivalent on both sides of a translation.  Many of the most important characteristic qualities of language, such as idiom, metaphor, sound, and texture, become diminished or distorted in translation; often they are lost altogether.

In moving from one language to another, the most appropriate balance between the two occurs when optimum fidelity to the first is maintained while maximum clarity in the second is achieved.  The translator’s awareness of each language influences his perceptions of the other.  When experience is translated into art, a medium must be chosen, and the nature of that experience is affected by the medium employed.

A medium provides a means for encoding information.  It is chosen for its suitability to a particular purpose, according to the needs and temperament of the artist; it is chosen for its potential to yield a desired result.  To select a medium is to select a language of translation that will allow experience to be revealed as form.

All media are codes, but photography is so transparent and self-effacing that it is seldom recognized as a code.   Most often the characteristic qualities of photography are effectively obscured by the information it carries.

Imagine having a different word for every type of tree.  Imagine not having the word “tree.”

Apple      Banyan

 

Ginkgo      Juniper

 

Mulberry   Olive Tree

 

Pawpaw     Quince

 

Sequoia    Tamarind

 

Willow     Yew

The concept tree can take form only as an image of a particular tree; it is an imaginative construction of language based upon our experience of actual, specific trees, or at least upon pictures or descriptions of trees.

The word chair denotes a particular type of object but not a unique example.  Each individual who encounters the word will form an image of a chair according to his/her own experience and the context in which the word is used.  Specificity is present only in the image formed in the mind of the listener or reader, not in the word itself.

A photograph of a chair is neither abstract nor generic; it depicts a particular object.  The potential for creative response is limited by a photograph’s relentless particularity; one is far more free (one cannot escape the freedom) to respond creatively when encountering a word and visualizing an object in one’s mind.

Each individual will attach different associations to a chair in a photograph, but all the interpretations will begin from the reference point of the particular chair in the picture and not from the concept of a generalized class of objects that is represented by the abstract word.

Borrowing an idea from Karl Buhler, we may divide the functions of language into three categories.

1.  Indication

The purpose of indication is to evoke a response, to call attention to something, in effect, to point one’s (index) finger and say: “There!”  John Szarkowski has compared photography with pointing, an act which is minimally active, understated, mute, and non-coercive.  Visual images, and photographs in particular, excel at indication.

Visual imagery reaches the viewer with immediacy and directness not available to verbal language, or in any other medium, such as writing or music, which depend upon the integration of impressions received over a period of time.

2. Expression

Expression is the capacity to inform another of one’s state of mind and/or to evoke in another a particular state of mind.  I may wish to express to you that I am angry.  I may wish to cause you to become angry.  I may want you to respond to my anger with fear, but you may laugh instead.

The effectiveness of expression depends upon interpretation: how will what is said be understood?  Visual imagery lacks the capacity to make statements; it cannot, therefore, overtly direct its own interpretation.

The recipient of a linear sequence, such as speech or music, must take an active role in communication, piecing together the sense of the whole from an accumulation of parts received over a period of time.  A one-piece-at-a-time sequence of information can be controlled in ways that are not possible with the apparent all-at-onceness of a picture.

3.  Explanation

The first two functions of language are employed by animals as well as by humans, whereas the third function of language is exclusively a human skill.  Explanation requires more complex symbolic manipulation than visual images alone can provide.

To explain is to give a specific meaning instead of simply directing attention or relying upon a particular interpretation.  To explain is to make a statement and not merely to present a set of possibilities; it is to enter the realm of provable truths and falsehoods.

Critics, beginning with Daumier, have complained that photographs describe everything and explain nothing.  But the gulf between description and explanation is merely more striking in photographs than in other representational visual images.  The quantity of information they so effortlessly and indiscriminately record seems to promise far more than it can possibly deliver.

Photography failed to fulfill the Renaissance belief that observation is equivalent to understanding, or the popular assumption that knowledge may arise spontaneously from an accumulation of facts.  Photography seemed certain to reveal answers, even truth itself.  Instead, photography’s unprecedented gifts of precision and detail have been surpassed only by the infinite richness of its subtle ambiguity.

Ernst Gombrich has described the process of making art as one of “schema and correction.”  The artist begins with a particular form (schema) and then responds to that form by making alterations (correction).  Each alteration creates a new form that is appraised, altered again, and so on, until the artist’s goal is achieved.

Typically, a line is drawn or an object is found; in either case, the initial form is identified.  Whether the initial form is made or found makes no difference.  Finding and making are two words for the same creative act.

Through the process of schema and correction, the artist creates/discovers correspondences between his actions and his imagination.  The piece of work itself is the principal arena of activity.  The artist responds more to what is happening in the piece of work than to anything outside it, including whatever subject matter the work might represent.

We tend to “discover” what we already know.  When we make pictures, we are most likely to create images that correspond to pictures we have seen.  We tend, therefore, to make pictures according to the conventions by which pictures are made to a greater degree than we make them according to direct observation.  Images affect the ways in which we see the world no less than our perception of the world affects the ways in which we see images.

In drawing and painting, marks are made one at a time in a process that is gradual, incremental, cumulative, and self-referential.  The first mark is made in response to a stimulus: an experience, an idea, an indefinable impulse.  Each succeeding mark is made and perceived within the context of previous marks.  The draftsman can alter his line even as he puts it down, just as the writer can change a word to shift the meaning of a sentence even before it is finished.

The basic unit of drawing is the line; the basic unit of writing is the word.  The single unit is rarely the entire piece of work.  But in photography, the basic unit is the picture itself, made whole in an instant.

In photography, an entire image is formed in the moment of the camera’s blink.  The photographer does not see or act upon this incipient picture as it is made in the camera, typically in a small fraction of a second, and any manipulation of it afterwards is usually a matter of minute and subtle alterations at most.  How then can a process of schema and correction be involved in the making of photographs?

The photographer’s primary decisions are made before the shutter is tripped, in anticipation of the image that will be formed.  Skills of anticipation may be developed to the level of intuition and insight.  As the photographer becomes more familiar with his medium, more aware of its characteristics and potential, he learns more accurately to predict, and thereby indirectly to control, his pictures.

The most common explanation for the success of a good photograph is that the photographer was in the right place at the right time.  The assumption is that anyone might have made the same picture given the same circumstances.

The phrase “the right place at the right time” implies that photography is a matter of observing the obvious, of simply recording what is in front of the camera.  Some pictures are better than others, it seems, only because some cameras are more fortuitously situated than others.

Infinite opportunities exist for discovering intersections of place and time that are “right.”  We imagine they are limited because we are so seldom prepared to see them.  Beauty, delight, revelation, and other attributes of “good” pictures are assumed to be rare properties that exist in special, usually remote places available to only a select few.

Even when we perceive significance in a particular subject and moment, the difficulty remains to make a picture that will reveal our perception.  Merely pointing a camera in the direction of something we find interesting does not guarantee that our photograph will convey our interest; it may provide exhaustively detailed physical evidence of what we saw, while failing entirely to convey the experience that compelled us to make the picture.

The primary goal of any business is to turn a profit, and the photographic industry is no exception.  The best way to accomplish that goal has been to make it as easy as possible to produce photographs.  The vast majority of camera users literally point and shoot with a minimum of thought.

Without any skill or training, anyone can make a sharp, perfectly exposed, full-color picture of virtually anything that can be seen.  Photographs can be made with the ease of a passing glance.  No other medium allows us to make such complex images with such little attention, ability, or involvement.

The apparent simplicity of photography obscures a complex of interconnected choices that underlie each  photograph.  Even though they are most often made unknowingly, these choices provide the opportunity for creative intervention.

The phenomenon of photography cannot be adequately explained by technical analyses; it must be understood as more than a set of physical and chemical operations.  Even those complaints that are expressed in technical terms – overexposed or underexposed, unsharp, noisy/grainy, distorted, contrasty, and so on – are meaningful only within a context of assumptions about the “correct” appearance of an image.

All choices are interpretive.  Choices in any medium are defined by the characteristics of the medium itself.  In photography, however, we may easily suppose that the medium is so self-sufficient that interpretive choices are either unavailable or insignificant.

The choices available in photography are, in fact, no more limited or limiting than choices in painting or music or poetry.  Perhaps the critical difference is that so many of the choices in photography so often are made unconsciously and remain invisible to most viewers.

The greater the number of choices one has, and the more skillful one is at selecting and using them, the more articulate, precise, and subtle one may be.  But the quantity of choices is secondary to the quality of selection.  Skill and judgment are reflected in the efficiency and elegance with which one selects from among available possibilities.

A choice will appear to be meaningful only when it can be recognized as a choice, when we can understand the context in which it was made, and when we can imagine potential alternatives.  We are dissatisfied with a work of art when we believe that better choices could have been made.  We are satisfied when the choices made correspond with those we imagine we might have made ourselves.  We are impressed when the choices seem both superior and inevitable.

The camera image, like life itself, is conceived in darkness.  A darkened room – a camera obscura – is the traditional locale of mysteries and magic, of dreams and theatre and making love.  Photography is magical in spite of the fact that all the physics and the chemistry have been explained, just as birth is a mystery no matter how much biology one knows.

The basic camera is a simple instrument, a sealed box with an opening in one side.  Light enters through the opening and passes to the opposite side, where it falls upon a piece of material that is sensitive to light.  But the particularities of camera design, the variations on this basic function, significantly influence the ways in which photographers make their pictures, and therefore they influence the ways in which we see, both in the realm of photography itself but also beyond.

A camera should be chosen for its ability to perform specific functions, just as a musical instrument is selected for its particular quality of sound.  Cameras, however, are frequently sold as picture-making equivalents of Swiss army knives.  Like any other kind of tool, each type of camera is better at some tasks than at others, just right for a few, and compromised or useless for the rest.

Ideally we would choose a camera according to the kinds of images we wish to make.  No single approach to photography is appropriate to all subject matter and to all points of view. No one would likely claim that all musical ideas can be adequately handled with a flute, in one key and one tempo, within a range of one octave, and in compositions that are invariably three minutes in length.  No less absurd is the idea that everything worth saying in photography can be accomplished with a 35mm camera and a normal lens, using high-speed black and white film, and 8×10 paper or the equivalent digital analogs of such details.

For most people, the camera is an impersonal instrument used for acts of almost reflexive commemoration.  For many, it is a baffling technological gadget.  The more automated and foolproof cameras become, the more omniscient, and independent they seem, and the less likely we are to consider how they affect us.  In this and in other respects, cameras are similar to automobiles and phones, the latter of which have largely displaced conventional cameras.

Some people dote on cameras, fondle them, and speak the jargon of their specifications like initiates in a secret society. Cameras become ends in themselves, objects to be appraised, collected, traded, and only incidentally used.  For many, the camera is a tool adapted to a need, an object made familiar through frequent use.  For a few, the camera becomes an extension of the eye, and for fewer still, an extension of mind and heart.  Such an approach to photography has become, it seems, increasingly rare with the ubiquity of ever-simpler ways to make pictures.  Or perhaps it has become much more widespread.  It’s hard to know.

The lens may serve as a metaphorical eye, but valid analogies between optics and vision are few.  The nature of sight is related to, yet vitally different from, the projection of light through glass or plastic discs.

Vision is a constantly active dialogue with the brain, a phenomenon so complex that it remains only partially understood.  Whereas the process of vision selects and integrates, the lens stares fixedly, without discrimination, devoid of context, incapable of taking an interest in anything.

The first step in the translation from idea to image is taken, appropriately, in the imagination.  Before a photograph is made, the subject before the camera is imagined as a photograph.  The imagined picture is sought within the camera’s viewfinder, a small window through which is seen a view that corresponds with the one that will be projected on the film or sensor when the shutter opens.

The unexposed film/sensor is as blank as a fresh canvas or a clean page, but the viewfinder of the camera is not blank at all; it is always full, and its contents change with every movement. The photographer responds not to the blank rectangle hidden within the camera, but to the evanescent image in the viewfinder.

When we focus a camera lens, we decide what is most worth looking at of the things we can see.  Just as our visual acuity is concentrated in the tiny foveal area of the eye – a small center in the larger field of our vision – so we focus the image in the camera’s viewfinder on a small part within our field of view. To focus is to define the subject of our attention.

The majority of traditional cameras are made to be held at eye level, against the face, providing a mask for the photographer. In some cases, the relative anonymity of the photographer is exploited to excuse aggression or to conceal detachment.

The waist-level viewfinder is more cumbersome to use, but it causes the photographer to respond to his subject in a more considered manner.  He is obliged to bend over slightly; in effect, he must bow toward the object of his attention.  The implications of this position may be as important as they are subtle.

The ground glass of the view camera glows beneath the shroud of the focusing cloth. The contemplation and meticulous organization of the ground glass image are the central acts in the ritual of using such cameras.

The LCD screen on the back of a digital camera is, somewhat quaintly, closer in appearance to the view camera’s ground glass than to a conventional camera’s viewfinder, just easier to see in spite of being smaller and with the image no longer upside-down and backwards.

The viewfinder shows us the camera’s point of view.  We must adjust ourselves in order to get the image in the camera to correspond with the image we see in our mind.  Looking through the viewfinder, we take a step forward or backward, left or right, making adjustments, coarse or fine, in our point of view.  We direct the camera, and the camera directs us.  If we are attentive, we often discover that the viewfinder shows us a more interesting picture than the one we had thought to make.

Prints are held, shuffled like cards, tucked into wallets, sealed in snapshot albums, framed, hung on museum walls.  They are tangible objects, cherished, hoarded, ignored and discarded like other objects.

Slides, gone entirely now, it seems, had to be projected in a darkened room to be seen at their best.  Their appearance, glowing on a screen, was ephemeral magic.  A slide show was like a séance.

Technology has nurtured our assumption that the more nearly a picture resembles the thing pictured, the better it is.  We expect a photograph to be in color because we see the world in color, and we expect the two to match.

All photographs transform whatever they show us, but in black and white, the transformation is more apparent than it is in color.  In the absence of color, the viewer is likely to be more aware of form, to participate more fully in interpretation, to be sensitive to suggestion as well as to description.

Time in photographs is fictional, surreal.  The suicide in the news picture, leaping from the roof of a building, is forever suspended outside the second floor; smiles are permanent; no one grows old.  Photographs do not simply record the evidence of singular moments; paradoxically, they create and they destroy an artifice of time.

A photograph can never show what is; it can only show what was.  The gaze of the photograph remains fixed on the past.  A photograph holds still, an improbable constancy of space and time, a fiction of stability glimpsed from the flux of now. Perhaps the most compelling illusion of photographs is that they seem to arrest and even to reverse the flight of the arrow of time.

If the shutter lingers open and something moves, the film or sensor records a blur, an aspect of the world as uniquely photographic as the frozen instant.  Multiple exposures disassemble time and reconstruct it with the sort of freedom found in some medieval paintings.  A photograph may suspend, in its way, the normal laws of the universe and show us that one object may appear to occupy several different positions at the same time and that several different times may be contained in the same moment.  And of course the opportunities for image manipulation increased exponentially with the transition from the darkroom to the computer.

The camera also compiles inventories of time that accumulate as history.  Just as photography can divide a second into several thousand parts, it can represent a year, a life, an age, through a handful of images or even a single picture.  A photograph is a mark in time, and as we move farther away from the moment it records, that mark comes to represent a larger and larger share of the time from which it came.

Not entirely by coincidence, at about the time that photography was invented, the study of archaeology changed in a radical way.  For centuries archaeology had been almost entirely a matter of deciphering ancient writings.  But in the nineteenth century, archaeologists began in earnest to dig in the earth for artifacts.  They looked for objects from which they might reconstruct tangible images of earlier civilizations. Their discoveries revealed that a simple storage jar, a toy, or a dinner plate might tell as much as sacred relics or crowns of gold.

Comparable discoveries were made as soon as photographs began to accumulate.  Simple to make, cheap, and ubiquitous, they are used primarily to record ordinary objects and events. Thus they preserve a history that is both humble and extraordinarily rich, detailed, evocative, and compelling.

In Science and Human Values, Jacob Bronowski asserts that the creative act is the perception of likeness.  He uses as an example one of the central discoveries in the history of science.

“Newton seized a likeness between two unlike appearances; for the apple in the summer garden and the grave moon overhead are surely as unlike in their movements as two things can be.  Newton traced in them two expressions of a single concept, gravitation; and the concept (and the unity) are in that sense his free creation.”

Perceiving that the force of gravity that brought the apple to the earth might also act, though far more weakly, upon the moon, Newton calculated their relative forces with their relative distances and discovered that the relationships were consistent.  “I found them answer pretty nearly,” he reported. His understatement was exceeded only by his precision, since he understood that likeness is not the same as equivalence.

The vital, tempering qualification implicit in the concept of likeness is perfectly reflected in Newton’s “pretty nearly.” Likeness is a matter of simile, which declares that one thing is like another.  But similes are more refined, more cautious, less immediate, and not so visceral as metaphors.  Through metaphor, we see one thing as another.

“Reason respects the differences and imagination the similitude of things.”  –  Percy Bysshe Shelley

The images of animals on the cave walls of Altamira and Lascaux were made as metaphors.  Picture and animal were apparently seen as equivalents: to have power over an image was to have power over the thing that the image represented.

Objects and designs that we define as primitive art were not made to be works of art, as we understand the term.  They were made to be used.  They were believed to have power, to be endowed with a capacity for affecting nature.  The artist was obliged to meet requirements that had little or nothing to do with aesthetic ideals or with personal expression.  The crucial question was whether or not the objects worked.

Among contemporary artifacts, the ordinary snapshot comes closest to the magical sense of equivalence and power characteristic of primitive art.  Like prehistoric pictures of the hunt, snapshots stand directly for the things they depict.

Rooted in familiarity, most snapshots carry with them a sense of their origins in friendly circumstances.  They commemorate families, companions, places, rituals, celebrations, achievements, and acquisitions.  They catalogue what we choose to consider the most important aspects of our lives. Snapshots are instruments of confirmation, “ceremonies of innocence.”  We regard them as proof that what we care about is real and, at least in a modest way, enduring.

Most stories are conversations between people who are familiar with one another.  They are usually about triumphs and troubles, events of daily life that qualify for telling even if they are no more than an excuse to talk.  Conversational stories are told with the tacit assumption that the experiences of the storyteller and those of the listener are closely shared.

Above all else, the purpose of such stories is the affirmation of common values.  They provide opportunities to give evidence, either directly or by reflection, of the wisdom, stupidity, goodness, evil, skill, ineptitude – in a word, the humanity – of the storyteller, of the subjects of the stories, and of the audience.

A snapshot album is a collection of crystallized and apparently simple stories that are not intended to travel far.  They tell what happened to those who already know.  Such pictures make no pretense of artistry; they serve to verify memory and to preserve the past.

I was walking down a path on the west slope of the Acropolis. Legions of buses stood in the street below.  Tourists filed out of the buses, into the heat, up the hill.  They proceeded in small groups and couples, chatting quietly, moving slowly beneath the fierce sun, pausing to rest.

A Japanese woman appeared, alone, walking at a regular and solemn pace against the hill.  Her eyes were fixed on the monumental ruins at the end of the path.  With both hands she held against her breast a black and white photograph, framed in black, the image facing forward.  It was a plain portrait, the face of a Japanese man, a picture of her husband, who was dead.

Perhaps they had planned this trip together.  Perhaps he had always wanted to see the Parthenon.  I did not know, and could not ask.  But clearly, in bearing his picture up that hill, she was bearing him.  The eyes of the picture saw the path, the tourists, the scrub pines, the hot sunlight, and the marble glories of Greece.

Most photographs are made for the purpose of equipping our future with a past.  We are afraid we will forget whatever has not been photographed.  We are distrustful of memory and doubtful of our ability to articulate our own experience. Photographs help to overcome the very losses they bring about, sustaining our dependency upon them.

Often we abdicate to the camera the responsibility for remembering, supposing that a picture is equivalent to memory itself.  But memory depends upon integrated networks of context made relevant through personal experience.  Photographs can disintegrate the world into dissociated fragments that externalize, depersonalize, and therefore corrupt the organic network of genuine memory.  At best, however, photographs can provide vital, synaptic connections across fields of memory, enriching and expanding our networks of context.

Memory, like vision, is constantly in flux.  Memory orders and interprets information; it is not a simple process of mechanical recall.  William James remarked: “Memory is no different from perception, imagination, comparison, or reasoning, apart from the fact that we attribute these mental constructions to the past.”

A photograph is static, evidence of a precise and unchanging intersection of position and time, a reduction of the activity of vision to the stability of an image.  Yet photography, like memory and history, influences and alters the information it preserves.

The essential function of memory is integration, not merely identification.  Photographs cannot substitute for memory, but they can serve as catalysts, igniting and directing the viewer’s energy through evocation and suggestion even more powerfully than through description.

Photographs have so thoroughly shaped our visual experience that we see the world as a collage of images as often as we see images as reflections of the world.  In other words, we see the world in terms of images we see of the world.

Personal experience is commonly overruled by the authority of photographs.  Events that seem most vivid to us tend to be those that most nearly resemble images we have seen: “It was just like a movie!”  The expressions “picture perfect” and “pretty as a picture” suggest that reality is most desirable when it conforms to the conventions of idealized pictures.

Photographs provide endless opportunities for synthetic, vicarious participation.  Because they are so authoritatively factual, we may indulge the illusion of intimate engagement while we become ever more remote from direct experience. We depend upon, and increasingly we prefer, the second-hand experiences provided by pictures to first-hand encounters with reality.

But a photograph can be more than an ephemeral fragment, used up with a glance.  At best, a photograph may be the charged center of a field of associations.  A photograph may resonate with the energy of time, place, vision, passion, light, and insight.

Sean Wilkinson
1990 / 2016

This essay was originally published under the title, “Thinking About Photography” in the magazine “Photographic INsight” Journal II, Number II, 1990.  It has been slightly revised.